Scrooged (1988)

Scrooged arrives as a metafictional retelling of Dickens, which is a polite way of saying the film has read the novella and would like us to know it. Bill Murray plays Frank Cross, a television executive who fires a subordinate on Christmas Eve and then spends the remainder of the running time being dragged through his own regrets by three ghosts and one frozen corpse. The target is greed, specifically the corporate variety: fear-mongering advertisements, a live broadcast staged as spectacle, the merchandising of a holiday. The satire lands on the man, not the machine. Frank is cruel, therefore Frank must be repaired. The boardroom survives intact and presumably sends a fruit basket.

Alfre Woodard's Grace and Mabel King's Gramma anchor the emotional back half, a working family rendered with warmth and no commentary whatsoever. Their presence is natural, which is to say the film never pauses to congratulate itself, and the needle accordingly stays low. Karen Allen's Claire runs a homeless shelter and serves as the moral counterweight to Frank's arithmetic, though she exists to be won back. Calvin, Grace's mute son, is a trauma device, and his climactic recovery is framed as a miracle. A miracle, in this taxonomy, is not accommodation.

Then Murray seizes the broadcast and delivers several uninterrupted minutes of sincerity, a sermon on kindness and second chances that plays as catharsis instead of instruction. The camera weeps. The studio audience sings. Richard Donner keeps the volume high and the sentiment higher, and the result is a Christmas film requesting credit for thawing a heart it spent ninety minutes freezing solid. We have seen this vintage before. It is well cellared, and it pairs adequately with a cold evening and low expectations.